This is a page from my physical commonplace book. Even though I am now keeping a sort commonplace book online in the form of a blog, I still try to maintain the habit of writing in the actual notebook, because I find I come at ideas differently—or they come at me differently—when I'm writing as opposed to when I am typing.
The diagram on the top left is someone's attempt to come up with a visual representation of thinking. The circle is divided into five sectors, and the kinds of thinking in each sector are listed in the center ring: reading from top right clockwise, they are apply, analyze, create, evaluate, and remember/understand. The middle circle is a list of verbs that are linked to eachof these kinds of thinking: for example, under "create" there are such verbs as combine, invent, estimate, imagine, and infer. The outer ring lists products for each category. For example, in the "evaluate" category are such products as recommendation letter, news item, court trial, and self-evaluation.
Underneath the chart, in my handwriting, is my notation: "This was published on somebody's blog and got me thinking about how you go about organizing a set of writing experiences in a pedagogically consistent way... Doug Noon had posted a similar schema on Borderland."
Below that is a continuation of what I was writing on the previous page, which was a reflection on the subject I was just talking about earlier on this page: the difference between writing and typing. In my own handwriting. On the previous page of my cpb, I had written, "My eyes watch the pen as I write. My fingers and arms and muscles and breath are all affected. My attention is focussed down, and the speed at which I deliver the words to the paper has a certain kind of singular rhythm to it."
In the typed portion you see above, I continued, "Typing is different." At that point I switched over to my computer because I wanted to write about what I was doing while I was doing it. And so the typed portion says: "When I type, my focus is not down but out. I watch the letters appear on the screen in quick little bunches. I still, after all these years, make a lot of physical errors when I type, and my forward progress stops as the third finger on my right hand darts up and over to tap at the delete key to erase little bunches of letters, one, two, or three at at time. Sometimes I’ll get throught almost an entire line without missing a letter, but the overall sense of movement is not as deliberate and forward-moving as in handwriting, and my thoughts tend to move ahead of my fingers."
At the top of the right-hand page above I first pasted in a graphic ("Get enlightened") from an ad I saw in a magazine, and then, since there was an empty space between that and the circle graph, I decided to draw a circle in and color it in just to balance out the page. I put in the yellow bars to mirror the highlighting I had done on the words "Activities" and "Products" on the chart.
The rest of the page is a continuation of my reflection. It says,
"Then there's cutting and pasting, in which all the work is done by the eyes, after which a mechanical process of highlighting and saving simply transports the words to another place, where they can be read again.
My second grade teacher told us the best way to learn something and to remember it was to write it out, saying it out loud as you did so. Her theory was that involving the entire organism—the eye, the brain, the head, the mouth—would imprint the word in your memory by accessing and stimulating different parts of the brain.
A lot of what is being researched right now in terms of neural networks and brain plasticity seems to confirm what she said. So the $64,000 dollar question seems to be "How does the use of digital circuitry affect the development or stimulation of neural circuitry?"
Mr. Schauble's Commonplace Book, January 10:
This is a page from my physical commonplace book. Even though I am now keeping a sort commonplace book online in the form of a blog, I still try to maintain the habit of writing in the actual notebook, because I find I come at ideas differently—or they come at me differently—when I'm writing as opposed to when I am typing.
The diagram on the top left is someone's attempt to come up with a visual representation of thinking. The circle is divided into five sectors, and the kinds of thinking in each sector are listed in the center ring: reading from top right clockwise, they are apply, analyze, create, evaluate, and remember/understand. The middle circle is a list of verbs that are linked to eachof these kinds of thinking: for example, under "create" there are such verbs as combine, invent, estimate, imagine, and infer. The outer ring lists products for each category. For example, in the "evaluate" category are such products as recommendation letter, news item, court trial, and self-evaluation.
Underneath the chart, in my handwriting, is my notation: "This was published on somebody's blog and got me thinking about how you go about organizing a set of writing experiences in a pedagogically consistent way... Doug Noon had posted a similar schema on Borderland."
Below that is a continuation of what I was writing on the previous page, which was a reflection on the subject I was just talking about earlier on this page: the difference between writing and typing. In my own handwriting. On the previous page of my cpb, I had written, "My eyes watch the pen as I write. My fingers and arms and muscles and breath are all affected. My attention is focussed down, and the speed at which I deliver the words to the paper has a certain kind of singular rhythm to it."
In the typed portion you see above, I continued, "Typing is different." At that point I switched over to my computer because I wanted to write about what I was doing while I was doing it. And so the typed portion says: "When I type, my focus is not down but out. I watch the letters appear on the screen in quick little bunches. I still, after all these years, make a lot of physical errors when I type, and my forward progress stops as the third finger on my right hand darts up and over to tap at the delete key to erase little bunches of letters, one, two, or three at at time. Sometimes I’ll get throught almost an entire line without missing a letter, but the overall sense of movement is not as deliberate and forward-moving as in handwriting, and my thoughts tend to move ahead of my fingers."
At the top of the right-hand page above I first pasted in a graphic ("Get enlightened") from an ad I saw in a magazine, and then, since there was an empty space between that and the circle graph, I decided to draw a circle in and color it in just to balance out the page. I put in the yellow bars to mirror the highlighting I had done on the words "Activities" and "Products" on the chart.
The rest of the page is a continuation of my reflection. It says,
"Then there's cutting and pasting, in which all the work is done by the eyes, after which a mechanical process of highlighting and saving simply transports the words to another place, where they can be read again.
My second grade teacher told us the best way to learn something and to remember it was to write it out, saying it out loud as you did so. Her theory was that involving the entire organism—the eye, the brain, the head, the mouth—would imprint the word in your memory by accessing and stimulating different parts of the brain.
A lot of what is being researched right now in terms of neural networks and brain plasticity seems to confirm what she said. So the $64,000 dollar question seems to be "How does the use of digital circuitry affect the development or stimulation of neural circuitry?"